Didn’t know most of those portals even existed still. Don’t care because I almost always take a scenic route anyway.
Funnily enough, I just rolled a DH for the exclusive purpose of farming on a worldwide scale, so yes, I’ve been using the portals in question. I won’t be ragequitting over this, of course, but really now. The removals are a stupid change.
Then you would be a minority.
Like this would actually have an impact on retail. How many heart stone do you have again? And isn’t it on a 15 minute CD or something? This sounds like a small step in the right direction though for retail. I just find it hilarious that when they remove something that will almost have no impact on them whatsoever because they have 1000 other avenues to instantly travel, retail loses their damn minds. I HAVE TO WALK 1 EXTRA MINUTE TO GET WHERE I NEED TO BE?!?!?! WTH BLIZZ
Irrelevant, really.
In Vanilla, there are three major cities for each expansion and four neutral goblin towns, and every one of them has boats, zeppelins, and/or flight paths for access to any other part of the world.
Portals became most needed / useful when Blizzard kept compartmentalizing the world with expansions. First Shattrath (TBC), then Dalaran in Northrend, then a bunch of newly accessible zones in Azeroth (Cata), then Pandaria, then AU Draenor and garrisons, then Dalaran in Broken Isles, and now whatever BfA has brought.
The Blizzard argument is that too much travel convenience = smaller world, and I call rank steaming pile. The travel convenience of portals was not what made Broken Isle zones feel tiny and cramped. It was the design laziness of not wanting wide open expanses. The travel convenience of portals is bad, but flight paths every 50 steps, 15 minute hearthstones, and whistles are good?
The world(s) feel small because they aren’t one cohesive world. Vanilla gave us some 20 zones on each continent, and passing between those were the only real breaks in the world. Each expansion has around eight total zones by the ends, and the area of them keeps shrinking and getting harder to navigate. Again, the problem is not the portals - and the fact they’re using that as their argument means they don’t even see the value of creating broad expansive world zones again.
Holy christ this post has 800 upvotes
Continuing the discussion from Stop removing portals:
- There no way to CoT? Flying there is so out of the question I guess there is “No way to CoT”… JFC
- Oh god what are we going to do!!! There’s no way in hell you can expect me to message a mage and ask kindly for a portal! Bu…bu…but what if there isn’t any mages around!!! You expect me to fly there on my 400% flyer??
- Yup can’t think of one single way to get there. Completely inaccessible.
- Oh god so now we have to fly to a forest instead of having it right next to me when I hearth?!?! OH GOD DO YOU THINK I GET PAYED TO PLAY THIS
- SO NOW IM GOING TO HAVE TO CHANGE MY HEARTH BECAUSE MY OLD ONE HAS NO PORTALS ANYMORE? THAT MEANS I WILL HAVE TO GO OUT IN THE WORLD AGAIN THERE IS NO WAY
Jesus christ… THESE are the posts that get almost 1k upvotes over on retail? Guys…I know some of you play retail and hate retail bashing but there is no way you can defend this nonsense.
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There’s a huge difference between farming a dungeon repeatedly to get the drop that I want, and watching cartoons on my other monitor while I sit through a 10 minute flight across a continent to get to where I have to get to.
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You are asking a group of players that is going to run for nearly 40 levels if not more about portals in the live client.
However, i will say that the way modern wow is built portals should allow for easy travel to anything that is not current content as only the most up to date content is of value at this point. i saw another probably unpopular opinion that i subscribe to at this point and it would be just remove flying from warmode and let everyone else fly at this point.
Lol you’re funny dude. Classic and Retail are two very different games. I’m gonna play classic and I don’t care for the conveniences of Retail there because it’s a different experience.
However, every place I’m trying to go to isn’t even current content and it has no relevancy to my character progression. I’m going there to farm cosmetics. I don’t see why they should be harder to get to lmao.
My main is 412ilvl and 7/9M progressed… the hell do I wanna do Dragon Soul for? Certainly not the gear.
What does it being old content have to do with you just being extremely lazy? You want to do something, but you don’t want to travel to do it. That’s the gist of it, period. Ask a mage to port you to kalimdor and fly there? That’s really that big of an issue? You can’t interact with people on retail anymore? Or is it you just can’t be arsed with taking your 2 minute flight? Such hard. Much rage.
You my friend, are the funny one here.
Lazy? Nah. Doesn’t really take effort to go from point A to point B, just time and Blizzard is trying to increase that time to inflate their “time played” metric.
Also, it’s not like you’re gonna be interacting or seeing a lot of people with these changes, especially in other places. You hardly ever see people while flying and if you’re on a flight path, you’re likely just afk.
I see players all the time in new Dalaran and the Shrines because their conveniences, but Ashran seems pretty empty due to lacking those. Dunno how the world is gonna feel bigger with everyone congested into one area, Stormwind or Orgrimmar, for their ports.
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I’m a mage. This is good.
That’s literally being lazy. Not wanting to do something to is extremely easy/complaining about it. That’s literally what lazy is.
“Hey man can you port me to theramore”
“Sure dude!”
You just interacted. Sorry the game is a little tougher for you now =(
I say you remove them all! You aren’t seriously arguing that more ports = bigger world are you? Please sit down child.
No not really lol.
Why would I interact with anyone though? Mages still won’t be comparatively convenient enough to get to where you’re going lol. Like I said, it all just takes time while doing nothing to increase the MMO feel of the game.
I’m not arguing that more ports makes the world bigger, I’m saying that removing them doesn’t make the world bigger.
The only way to make the world feel bigger in this stage of the game is to make old zones more relevant to end game. Darkshore and Arathi Highlands are great because now as a 120, I have a reason to those ancient zones. Only problem I have is that we’re phased away from lowbies so we don’t get to see them do their own thing while we do ours.
Just put them ALL in the same room…and fix the panda portal. That being said i dont play. Also the world feels small cuz nothing matters in it, not cuz of portals.
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Let’s see how many times someone can be wrong in one post
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The only way to make the game feel bigger is to remove all means of instant/quick travel. You can have every zone in Azeroth be relevant but it won’t feel big sitting on your 400% mount speed mount or porting all over the place when you use ONE of your 15 minute hearthstones to port to a location near where you want to be.
But of course you can’t see that because it’s such a foreign concept to you, you actually think ‘there’s no way to get to CoT now’.
When creating a fantasy world, you come up with ways that world works, and the way people play in that world move and the tools they have available. And you try and make all of that make as much sense as possible without too many people asking “why don’t they just fly the eagles to mordor?”
In World of Warcraft, you traversed the world thru running, mounting (basically faster running), flight points managed by flight masters, boats, zeppelins, mage portals, and a warlock summon if you were lucky. Now, why you would want to introduce a system that feels significantly more contrived that directly competes with an established class roll in mage portals? I have no idea. The “jump on the back of this cart” method of travel introduced to the game and now in silverpine forest and the wandering isle feels significantly more organic to the game, while at the same time also not invalidating previous methods of travel that was part of a class. The establishment of all those portals didn’t just diminishing the class, and every player that plays it, you’re taking away from the world and its integrity.
Overall the fact that all those portals ever got added in the first place speaks to a design philosophy that does not emphasis world and class integrity. It’s the exact same thing that happened with world markers. With additionally complex raid mechanics in tbc, raiders needed a mechanism to communicate and mark areas. So what happened? The engineering profession was chosen to provide that role with the creation of flares. Flares allowed players to mark areas and communicate in ways not previously possible, and it was added to the game in a completely organic way that built up player characters and the professions. The purple flare schematic only came from black temple, allowing T6 raiders access to an additional color flare, which could come in handy for more complex flare usage. Then what did they do? Continue to develop flares to encourage their use and improve usability? No, they left them, and then eventually just implemented a system of world markers. A nice system. A usable system. Works well. But an artificial system that takes over for something that was already established in an organic and player-controlled way and was an added part of engineering.
Sometimes I like to pick pocket mobs on my rogue for a junk box for poisons that I can’t use anymore, just to try and make it feel like I could still be a rogue again. Or i’ll toss a smoke flare on something in a raid as an indicator, as if the actual in-game tools our characters used is what mattered instead of interfacing with systems layered on top of a game that feels gutted.
But, lets get back to portals. Will removing these specific portals make the world “feel bigger,” if that is their actual goal? Probably pretty minor at best. Blizzard has, in my estimation, very little idea on how to make a world feel “big.” They seemed to do a decent job of it almost by accident in vanilla, and to a lesser extent in TBC. If they understood how to make a world feel big, BFA would probably feel much bigger, without actually being substantially different. Blizzard devs seem not to even approach this game from the perspective of developing a living rpg, it’s actually quite weird.
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this times infinity.
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Honestly for me it doesn’t make much sense, the old world has little vaule or meaning to go back to it besides prof’s for mog mounts farming a old dungi etc. but since everyone afk auto fly there myself it does’t help.
IF they wanted to make the world feel more alive get rid of flying in all old world area’s and remove Flight masters, or only have one or two per zone.
calling my points wrong and not even arguing them lol goes to show you don’t know what you’re talking about
The worlds still feel plenty big while leveling since the content is relevant somewhat, but why’s it matter to a max level or over leveled alts when there’s nothing to do in those places except go to an instance for tmog?
Removing ways of getting to those places and not even giving a good reason to go there is just going to make people less likely to venture into those zones thus making it more dead.
I go to Moonglade all the time on my Druid just to chill because it’s convenient, but I can’t remember ever going there on any other character. Why would I? It offers nothing, but aesthetics anyways.